LeBron James, by any imaginable measure, has played more NBA basketball than any human in history. He is the league’s all-time leader in minutes, games and seasons. When a player reaches the league as an 18-year-old, it’s usually safe to assume you’ll have seen everything he has by the time he’s 41. But a bit more than a week ago now, James showed head coach JJ Redick something he’d never seen before.
The Los Angeles Lakers trailed the Denver Nuggets by one with around one minute left in the fourth quarter of a critical game. Cam Johnson fired away from 3 for a shot that might have iced the game and, even though he missed, the rebound looked as though it would settle right back into the hands of Jamal Murray. That is, until James threw himself onto the court in an attempt to take back the ball. He couldn’t quite secure it, but he turned an offensive rebound for Denver into a jump ball that eventually led to a critical Marcus Smartsteal on the way to perhaps their biggest victory of the season.
For Redick, this was new. “After the game, I said, ‘In 23 years of watching you play in the NBA and the three years I watched him play in high school, I never saw him make a full-out extension dive like that,” the Lakers coach explained, before revealing that James confirmed as much. “It’s awesome. I know he’ll feel that tomorrow, but that’s a winning play.”
Winning plays are, of course, old hat for James, but not this sort of winning play. James spent the first two decades and change of his career as the star around whom his teams needed to orbit. He orchestrated every possession on offense. At his best, he also took on the tougher available matchups on defense and even as he aged into more of an off-ball role on that end of the floor, he still used his unmatched basketball IQ to direct traffic and make plays. His teams have needed him available for as many of the 48 playable minutes in as many of the 82 scheduled games as humanly possible. Taking a needless injury risk like a full-extension floor dive for a loose ball just wasn’t worth it. He had role players for that.